Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Lincoln

Untroubled waters

This is one of those architectural miniatures I particularly like. It’s St Mary’s conduit house, built in the 16th century to provide a source of clean water for the people of Lincoln. It’s said to have been built partly out of fragments of from a chantry in an old friary that was dissolved, during the depredations imposed by Henry VIII on the country religious houses, in 1530. By incorporating them into the walls of the conduit house (connected to a network of supply pipes begun by the friars) a few years after the dissolution, the builders gave a new life to bits of tracery and blind arcading, plus some corbels, niches, arch heads, and other bits and pieces.

They also provided an invaluable service to local people. The conduit and others in the city carried on supplying water until 1906, although not the conduit house did not remain in exactly the same positron – it was moved away from the street into St Mary’s churchyard in 1864. When mains water was laid on at the beginning of the 20th century, the supply from the conduits was trusted more than the piped water. I seem to remember that there was widespread suspicion of piped water in the Victorian period, with London water sellers hawking water from bowsers with the cry ‘Pure water! None of your pipe sludge!’ And no wonder, given the disease carried by infected water supplies in the early days. In Lincoln, confidence in the old conduits continued during the 1904–5 typhoid epidemic, so perhaps this attractive facility saved some lives too.

4 comments:

In the far south of the county, at Stamford, St Paul's conduit remained in use until 1900. An outbreak of typhoid in the eastern end of the town, 'enjoying' the use of that conduit, resulted in its closure after uncommonly speedy action by the health authorities and the public analyst. Some of the boarders at the town grammar school suffered - and most embarrassingly, the Headmaster whose house probably shared the nearby conduit's water supply. Extensive housing development had taken place above the conduit spring in the late C19 ....... As always, enjoyed the blog - thank you.

You almost included in the shot the interesting Anglo-Saxon tower of St Mary le Wigford. Just to the right of the doorway is a reused Roman tombstone built into the wall, and in the top equilateral triangle of the "gable" of this the inscription EIRTIG HAD ME BUILT AND ENDOWED TO THE GLORY OF CHRIST AND ST. MARY. When I visited in 2016 only the word EIRTIG was visible, and that only because I knew from an old photo that it was meant to be there. Anglo-Saxon inscriptions of course are very rare: the W is (reportedly) rendered by the wen sign, like a P with a triangular head instead of rounded, "as on the sundial at Kirkdale" (near Pickering, Yorks.) So the tradition of reusing old masonry goes back a lot further than the 16th century! A bit of a puzzle though: the Roman inscription was not erased or turned into the wall - in my notes I comment that anyone who could read the Anglo-Saxon could probably read the Latin just as well. My theory is that the tombstone was a well-known landmark just where the Roman streets intersect, and that popular sentiment would not allow Eirtig to destroy it or remove it.

Thanks you both for your comments. I didn't know the story about Stamford, per apse: you are a valuable conduit of information...

Joseph: I puzzled at that Roman stone and found it hard to make anything out of the Anglo-Saxon inscription – but then my Anglo-Saxon is very rusty and I never was very good at it when I had to learn it at university long ago. Your theory of a local landmark sounds credible. There's also a stone-clad alms box by the entrance to the churchyard which is made of recycled masonry. It's a great place for recycling, Lincolnshire. One of my Lincolnshire relatives talks about 'Lincolnshire meanness', but self-deprecation is also a local characteristic.

The builders clearly did give a new life to bits of tracery and blind arcading, corbels, niches, arch heads and other decorations. But that might have been a bit too Catholic, straight after the dissolution of the monasteries.

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